The Latest Pango + HarfBuzz Is Leading To A Messy Font Rendering Situation For Some

[oiaohm]

I noticed something interesting.

Not all version of Tahoma fonts are the same or render the same. Compare the tiny text of the Tahoma font (gotten from Wine project) versus the newer Tahoma font version from Windows 10.

This gets horrible. Wine project does need people wanting to work on fonts to improve them. Also it would have paid for you to pull the old font out of corefonts. You would have seen the problem is more complex.

So the real bug are copycat fonts with no hinting information?

Its not that straight forwards. Microsoft genuine Tahoma fonts has different hinting and different gliphs between the versions this does include some difference in spacing. Lets say you use the Windows 10 Tahoma font with a Windows win16 application you will have some issues because some of the differences will come out.

Wine Tahoma font is being made as generic as possible so applications work and are read able not that the result looks perfect so there has not been the focus on hinting also for a long time using in font hintting was patented so you use depend on auto hinting in the font engine.

[carewolf]

That is such an odd argument. Aliasing was specifically developed for no-HiDPI displays. Though you need to good hinting to avoid smearing. Unfortunatly though hinting has been loosened in recent years and you might need to force freetype to use an older hinting algorithm.

[Delgarde]

The other day I was experimenting with GPU drivers and eventually ended up with no hardware acceleration. I was surprised how well GNOME ran on software rendering, but then I remembered it's CPU bound, not GPU bound.

Contrary to reputation, it's surprisingly functional on some pretty crappy hardware. My travel machine is a crappy Celeron-based netbook, and it runs Gnome as well as it runs anything else...

[Delgarde]

everyone hopes that someone else will work for him for free

Yeah, I suspect that's the reason for a lot of the unhelpful responses. Birdie's bug reports do come across as somewhat entitled and demanding, and that just doesn't encourage people to be helpful. Especially when people are already on edge with the stress of lockdowns and stuff, and already inclined to just say "fuck it"...

[evil_core]

At this point I think the subtle differences are subjective. The screen shot is from my 1080p screen (not HIDPI). Maybe some feature got removed when Pango switched to using HarfBuzz for a specific thing but I don't personally DONT think the Windows font rendering looks better. I only agreed originally because apparently the copy cat MS fonts offered by Wine don't provide hinting.

It's a trade off at best if you ask me. From the screenshot you can see super tiny 6 and 7px fonts look objectively worse under Windows while 8px is slightly sharper on Windows. However, I personally happen to think the anti-aliased look of the Win 10 Tahoma font on Linux at 8px looks good and even better than Windows. The anti-aliased look gives it a stronger contrast on a white word processor background, making it easier on the eyes to see while the 6px size on Windows looks like blurry crap.

Sure many can disagree with me, but lets face it's bullshit if you think this font looks horrendously worse under Linux.

In both cases they are blured, in case of linux you are using standard grayscale antialiasing, while under windows youare using LCD Filter (subpixel antialiasing). And we know nothing about hinting settings under both systems. so you are comparing apples to oranges. To get crystal clear sharp font look, you need to disable antialiasing and enable full font hinting. Another thing is that it's not so easytask, because of all the stupid rules inside of /etc/fonts/conf.d, which hardly tries to substiture all "non-free"(originals like Microsoft Tahoma) by using "free alternatives" (like Liberation fonts family).

[evil_core]

most average people will not use ms fonts on linux, they will use default fonts which work great out of the box. all your pain is self-inflicted(as usual). and those other oses all have "unusable" fonts by your definitions, i.e. the crazy one is you, everyone else is happy

Because most people are ignorants and don't care, until you show them side-by-side comparisons.
It's like people were buying TVs and computer displays for years when "High Definition" arrived, assuming that only thing that matters is "Size"
and "Brand". But when you show them side-by-side cheap TN, with washed colors and smaller IPS or VA, they usually change their mind. When I was teenager and went to small shop to buy very cheap and relatively big(23"-27", not sure know, but then 15" was mainstream)), they made presentation of this display and other(also TN, but way better) and told to better not buy this screen and save money for smaller, but better one. I was enlightened then and was frustrated every time I had to sit against some crappy, washed out glossy TN crap.

[evil_core]

yes, average imbecile will buy windows 10 license to pay for unhinted fonts because he doesn't like unhinted fonts, but only if they are free

No, you canget most of these(if you dont need post Windows 7 fonts, like Calibri, etc):

https://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web

[Guest]

Not any more. Attitudes like this is what pushed me back to Microsoft Windows & Apple on the desktop/mobile. I have work to do, don't have time coddling toxic free software egos that break or remove significant compatibility features simply because their narrow personal use doesn't include it.

The only thing I use free software for any more is file servers where the software stack is significantly smaller and generally backed up with support dollars.

Same happens even in closed source software, commercial software etc. For example, Android R's Scoped Storage changes where they completely break the way storage worked, and have narrow minded ideas of what is a valid use case and what isn't.

[birdie]

Yeah, I suspect that's the reason for a lot of the unhelpful responses. Birdie's bug reports do come across as somewhat entitled and demanding, and that just doesn't encourage people to be helpful. Especially when people are already on edge with the stress of lockdowns and stuff, and already inclined to just say "fuck it"...

I'm really curious about these parts. Care to elaborate which of the two bug reports contain any of this? Maybe consecutive comments have something remotely similar to what you said but the original bug reports are concise, clean and pretty neutral.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/463

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/issues/2394

[slalomsk8er]

most average people will not use ms fonts on linux, they will use default fonts which work great out of the box. all your pain is self-inflicted(as usual). and those other oses all have "unusable" fonts by your definitions, i.e. the crazy one is you, everyone else is happy

I guess I install them by habit but there was a reason.
Wasn't the reason to use the fonts to get crappy/corporate websites to render correctly or word documents?